Linguistic Insecurity Quotes

When I speak to people from Britain, that's when I feel like a fake, speaking with an American accent.

I feel comfortable in Spanish, I chat like a parrot, but I don't have the confidence in Spanish that I do in English.

I know I mispronounce things constantly, because maybe I read more than I talk, but I don't know the proper way to say a lot of things, even though I know what they are. But then I know I look like a moron.

If I had to speak in front of a Korean audience, I would be hard pressed to sound other than a little girl.

I, of course, don't have an accent. This is just how things sound when they are pronounced properly.

I don't know if I'm truly at home in any language.

It is a sore point, because you do have advantages if you have access to more than one language. You also have problems, because on bad days you don't trust yourself, either in your first or your second language, and so you feel like a complete halfwit.

I toned down my accent at school; otherwise, people would pick on me.

We think people go to a dictionary to find out what a word means. Most people go to the dictionary because they don't want to look stupid.

My mom says I'm destined to be the sort of man who uses big words but pronounces them incorrectly.

I was so embarrassed about mispronouncing words. I just knew how to smile.

When I write in Italian - this is just the metaphor that came to me immediately, and I really think this is what it is - I feel like I'm writing with my left hand. Because of that weakness, there is this enormous freedom that comes with it.

Prescriptive grammar has spread linguistic insecurity like a plague among English speakers for centuries, numbs us to the aesthetic richness of non-standard speech, and distracts us from attending to genuine issues of linguistic style in writing.

I'm already really aware and self-conscious of my accent.

Writers who hedge their use of unfamiliar, infrequent, or informal words with 'I know that's not a real word,' hoping to distance themselves from criticism, run the risk of creating doubt where perhaps none would have naturally arisen.

What is the fear inside language? No accident of the body can make it stop burning.

I sometimes feel nervous because I give stupid answers to certain pointless questions. It happens in Turkish as much as in English. I speak bad Turkish and utter stupid sentences.

I think my English is bad.